In a World of Festival Clones, Pickathon Stands Apart
Photos by Josh Jackson
I’m having trouble getting from Pickathon’s Galaxy Barn to its iconic Woods stage. The direction is clear. But along with sights like a group of talented kids busking in a clearing and eye-catching art installations, the path itself is lined with brambles laden with the juiciest, most delicious blackberries I’ve ever tasted. The going is slow.
But the destination is worth picking up the pace. Crafted from fallen branches scattered on the 80-acre property to create a magical backdrop, the Woods stage serves as the perfect venue for laid-back country folk of the Rose City Band, the sun-drenched music playing nicely with the filtered light coming through the dense pine forest. The audience sits in a clearing shaded by the canopy above, where a red-breasted sapsucker hunts for insects in the tops of Douglas Firs. The lone bird adds its chips to the five-piece band whose name is a nod to their—and the festival’s—Portland, Ore. home.
Hundreds of music festivals have been taking place all across America this summer, and most of them share a similar model and a similar lineup, as the same collection of bands tours from one to another. Pickathon is not among them.
Now in its 25th year, the festival began small and somewhat counterintuitive, as a way to celebrate music that crossed genre boundary lines at a time when most music festivals catered to one specific type of music. “It was actually kind of a curse early on,” admits founder Zale Shoenborn, a Kentucky native who’s made Portland his home for most of his adult life. “Genre festivals were really big and they brought built-in audiences.”
Even the artists weren’t immune to the blackberries’ call.
But Pickathon hasn’t ever really played by anyone else’s rules. In 2019, the festival moved to an undeveloped piece of land on Pendarvis Farm, just southeast of Portland in the quickly growing community of Happy Valley. Coming out of Covid, Shoenborn and his team turned the challenge of a blank slate into an opportunity to create something new, with each stage part of a “neighborhood,” designed anew each year by teams of local artists and architects.
For the main stage this year ZGF, the firm that redesigned PDX airport with its striking wooden ceilings, gave a similar treatment to “The Paddock” with wooden slat cones rising out of the stage in front of Mount Hood in the distance. The Courtyard welcomes attendees with a giant fish sculpture/tunnel that also serves as a dance floor when the impressive light display illuminates the Oregon nights. The Coyote neighborhood is forest playground for families and kids, providing a chance for local teens to take the stage. The Cherry Hill, Windmill, Grove and Woods stages all present different backdrop designs of wood and cloth for live music and DJ sets between bands. And the Refuge offers dozens of different healing massage sessions, along with havens for rest and meditation.
There’s comedy in the Lucky Barn and author readings on the Windmill stage. At an outdoor oasis for dining called Curation, attendees can buy tickets to a dinner from a celebrated local chef, along with an intimate set from one of the artists—ours involved Bonnie Morales of the James Beard-nominated Kachka, which serves Eastern Bloc dishes, paired with Australian jazz-funk experimentalists Surprise Chef.
Surprise Chef plays the Curation stage.
But the heart of the festival is music discovery, as Shoenborn explains. “So the curation part of it—it’s not the algorithm thing, it’s not just looking at who are the draws. It’s looking at ‘who are the people who come every year going to just fall in love with in’ bands?”
Most every act at the festival plays at least twice during the weekend, allowing festival attendees to catch most of the acts—or all of them, as the Portland Mercury’s Holly Hazelwood managed to prove this year. So after Austin, Texas, indie rockers Being Dead played a set on the main stage on Friday night too late for my jet lagged body to make it after flying in from Atlanta, I could catch them in the tightly packed Galaxy Barn for a frantic, sweaty rock show the way God intended. And though I tried to catch as many different acts as possible (though not nearly as many as Hazelwood), when an act like Humbird so captivated me one day, I couldn’t resist a second dose the next.
The idea of curation is why Pickathon regulars have gotten early access to bands that will play the big stages of bigger festivals later, whether that’s seeing Kamasi Washington’s very first festival performance in 2015 or Billy Strings that same year or Wet Leg playing in a barn in 2022. This year, the lineup pulled from Saskatchewan to Indonesia, Turkey to the Louisiana bayou. Even the bigger names in the lineup—Taj Mahal, Fruit Bats, Portugal. The Man, and Greensky Bluegrass—tend to be a little more eclectic than your average festival.
“Even if you don’t know half of the lineup, you’re going to dig it,” says Fruit Bats’ Eric Johnson, who’s become a festival regular over the years. “Also, I like the sort of vague non-separation between audience and bands. I’m still just like walking around out there, and it’s fine. I always say it’s the dog park for bands too, like where we’re sort of like let loose and we all kind of run around and sniff each other a little bit in an awesome way. It’s just the crazy festival in the woods.”
In addition to the two Fruit Bats sets, Johnson joined in the tribute for the late Portland folk music legend Michael Hurley, where a number of different artists tackled Hurley’s songs backed by his collaborator Lewi Longmire and members of The Croakers.
Fruit Bats
After spending just a few hours at the festival, I was suddenly struck that despite the thousands of people attending and eating meals and drinking delicious cocktails, there was no trash on the ground. There weren’t even that most common festival sight—trashcans—scattered about. Pickathon has taken sustainability to the next level with tokens for reusable plates and metal cups to last the weekend. The festival is made possible by its 1,800 volunteers, and even the stages are recycled to give back to the community. There’s just an honest-to-goodness goodness vibe that permeates everything going on at the farm.
In 2023, Paste writer Adrian Spinelli called Pickathon “the best indie festival in the country.” That’s what got me on that cross-country plane. And while there may be a select few other contenders (looking at you, Newport), I can’t really argue. There’s something special happening in the woods of Northwest Oregon. A quarter-century in, Pickathon is hitting its stride.
Photos from Pickathon 2025
Being Dead video session
Being Dead video session
Hannah Cohen
Ocie Elliott
Colby T. Helms & the Virginia Creepers
Humbird
Humbird’s second set
Josh Johnson
East Nash Grass
Haley Heynderickxs
Taj Mahal
Derya Yıldırım and Grup Şimşek
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